


A Dunnsmouth Miracle

by NightsMistress



Category: We Are All Completely Fine - Daryl Gregory
Genre: Ghosts, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:20:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: Dunnsmouth hadn’t changed in the ten years since Harrison left it behind. Or at least, that was until Barbara showed up.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Supertights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Supertights/gifts).



> My thanks to drayton for the beta ♥

Dunnsmouth hadn’t changed in the ten years since Harrison left it behind.

Ten years should have been long enough for the sea and land to begin reclaiming the empty shells of buildings, long enough for the wind and rain to soften the edges of broken bricks and wood, long enough for the smell of blood and death to dissipate entirely. If Dunnsmouth truly had been destroyed by a hurricane then the rawness of the destruction would have been smoothed away in the intervening years.

Instead, Dunnsmouth still looked like a gaping wound, torn open and gutted by the devastation left in the wake of a failed incursion from the other side. Time passed strangely inside the town’s borders now, slipping back and forth without rhyme or reason. The sky was sometimes black with the specter of Urgaleth after it glutted itself with sacrifice, and other times a clear, alien blue that seemed pitiless. The air was thick with ghosts singing in a strange key, generations of Dunnsmouth residents trying to summon monsters to their town. Sometimes it was quiet enough to hear the keening of the once principal of Dunnmouth.

Most people glanced over the name on a map, ignored the directions of the sat-nav and drove around it, sensing that Dunnsmouth was not a place for people. Getting into the town itself required continuous conscious effort, vestigial blindsight telling even the most supernaturally insensitive of persons to leave now. The town itself was a ghost town, enough to drive anyone with a trace of sensitivity half-mad.

Harrison, who had destroyed it to save the eastern seaboard, hadn’t slept properly in days. He privately believed that he was already half-mad, to come back here in the first place. No sane man would drive across the country, set up camp in a leased car outside the ruined house he once lived in, and search for the hideously beautiful etchings of a monster that he personally had decapitated a decade earlier. Certainly no sane man would stay in Dunnsmouth for five days on nothing more than a hunch.

He scrubbed at his face and studied the images on his laptop one more time as he sat on the bonnet of his car. On the first day in Dunnsmouth Harrison learned that the camera on his smartphone, being as it lacked any capacity to be sane or insane, saw Dunnsmouth as it actually was and not how human eyes saw it. To the camera, Dunnsmouth was nothing more than an abandoned town, weathered and battered by the elements. The only suggestion to the camera lens that something was wrong was the tide: permanently pulled away from the pier and exposing the ocean depths to the baking heat of the sun.

Once, the Scrimshander’s cave was only accessible by swimming underwater. Now, with the ocean permanently miles away from the pier, Harrison would be able to simply walk down to it. Assuming he could find the entrance in the first place. He squinted at one cave that looked particularly promising, a gouge in the cliff face that looked like it could fit the description.

As he focused on the photograph, a chill gripped him. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes a ghost would walk through him as if he was the intangible one. What was unusual was that it walked back before stopping to stare at him. He raised his head, shivering from the cold, and sucked in a shocked breath.

Harrison thought that in the five days that he had seen everything that Dunnsmouth had to show him. He’d seen his mother before the Scrimshander siphoned her soul out of her body, fussing over her buoys as if she was about to drive off and deploy them to find her monsters. He’d seen sailors dressed in turn of the century clothes existing in the same space as his classmates, all singing in a eldritch key that made his hair stand on end.

But until now he hadn’t seen Barbara.

She didn’t look as she had when she died, split open along precise lines, a small mercy. Instead, Barbara looked like she did at their group therapy sessions: carefully put together, pantsuit, air of concentration as she took a cautious step towards him.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Barbara.”

“Hello, Harrison.” She didn’t sound surprised. Once, he might have said that she sounded numb. Anesthetized, though that was in bad taste given how she died. However, he could see the resignation in the slump of her shoulders, the bitter acceptance in her eyes, because they were a mirror to his own. You never really left Dunnsmouth. Not when it was carved into your bones by the slice of the Scrimshander’s knife, the snap of a monster’s teeth through your leg.

“What the hell? Why are you _here_?” His horror clawed up his throat and strangled his voice. “Have you been here since you died?”

Barbara shook her head. “No. I don’t think I’ve been here that long at all.”

“Jesus.” Harrison shook his head.

She didn’t ask him why he was there. Instead she looked at him, sitting on the bonnet of the car he chose purely because the back seats folded down, six month old laptop with the scuff marks from where he used it to block a blow from a a cryptid with razor-sharp nails, and asked, “What are you looking for?”

“The Scrimshander’s cave.”

Barbara sighed like a child being promised a treat. “I’d like to see it.”

“Sure.” He laughed. There was no mirth in it. “I can’t make you any _more_ dead.”

She smiled, distantly kind. “You didn’t kill me to begin with.”

Harrison chose not to answer that, because even he could recognize the futility of arguing with the dead. They usually had so much more time to waste. Instead, he pushed himself off the bonnet of his car and dropped his laptop inside the open passenger door before walking to where Barbara was waiting. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned the camera function on, holding it out in front of him.

The contrast between what he saw and the empty, deserted town that the camera saw would have been startling if he hadn’t seen it so many times already. Instead he merely grunted impatiently as Barbara craned her head to look at the screen, staring at it in surprise.

“It’s Dunnsmouth,” he said, shrugging. “We should get going. This place gets eerie at night.” A younger, stupider Harrison would have quipped that it would be hard to tell if Dunnsmouth got more creepy. Fortunately, he wasn’t traveling with a younger self. Barbara instead nodded gravely.

“Yes.” Her voice was quiet and thin. “I imagine it would.”

They set off, Harrison’s smartphone guiding the way.

* * *

 

Ten years of sun baking down on the exposed sea bed had swapped the danger of Deep Ones with twisting an ankle and lying on a ridge listening to the songs of the damned while being unable to do a thing about it. Harrison wasn’t sure which one he’d prefer, all things considered. His steps cracked the brittle sun-baked surface of the abandoned silt, filling his boots with warm sand. He swore whenever that happened, a fluent stream of profanity that caused Barbara’s mouth to twitch in some aborted emotion, but he was at worst annoyed. The grit of sand between his sock and shoe was something to distract him from the singing, the sky, the memories.

Barbara walked carefully, as she always did, but it was only out of habit. She left no depressions in her wake. He was careful not to touch her. Not that she invited him to touch him in the first place. It was Greta who noticed it first, an off-hand observation just as he had dropped her off at the poured-concrete block she lived in. Barbara would touch Stan, but it was a studied movement, mimicking what other, _normal_ people would do. Otherwise, she was painfully self-contained and deliberately isolated. At the time, Harrison had quipped that that couldn’t be true as she had two children. But since then he had studied her and realized that Greta was right.

Barbara kept her distance and Harrison was more than happy to let her. He wasn’t able to delude himself that it was out of kindness. Harrison’s own supernatural abilities were ordinarily patchy and unreliable, enough to give him a brief flash of insight and nothing more. Here, where the separation between his world and the one beyond was as fragile as a soap bubble, he could do much more than make a ghost real and tangible. It would be so easy.

So he kept his hands tucked in his pockets of his suit jacket as they picked their way down the cliffs, guided by his phone. It helped that the cliff was more of a staircase than a true cliff, with ledges at a convenient height for stepping down into. Harrison found himself wondering why that had happened; after all, the Deep Ones could swim up. Perhaps one day something would claw its way up from the base of the cliff and the Deep Ones had carved the ledges in preparation of that day.

“How are the others?” Barbara asked, breaching the tense silence between them. Harrison finished his step down to the next level of the cliff and frowned up at her.

“You don’t want to know about your family?” He shook his head. “Not that I’d know how they were going.”

She nodded, less in agreement than encouraging him to continue speaking.

“They’re okay.” Harrison shrugged. He scanned the ledge around him for the safest passage down to the next point. A gently descending crease looked promising and he tested it with his foot before starting the careful descent along it, one hand trailing against the cliff face for balance. Barbara drifted behind him, untroubled by the treacherous terrain. “Stan and Martin are housemates, would you believe? Funniest thing you’d ever see. Doctor Sayers is back at work.”

“And Greta?”

Harrison sighed. “I forgot. You wouldn’t know what happened after …” He swallowed. “Anyway. The Sisters found Greta, and she killed them with the monster inside her. I don’t know where she is now.”

“But you’re going to go looking for her?”

“Eventually.” He said it heavily, to quash further conversation. In the group, it might have been called angrily, but Harrison continued to dispute that he was angry. Annoyed, frustrated, on edge from the _constant fucking singing_ and wanting to punch something until he felt skin split and blood splatter his knuckles.

Harrison stopped, closed his eyes, took a breath. Took another, when that didn’t help. When he opened his eyes, Barbara had taken a step backward and was watching him warily. “I’m here because the Scrimshander carved a message to us on your bones, and I want to know whether he’s got any other fucked up secrets in here before I go looking for Greta.”

He stepped down to the next ledge and then the next one. Conversation over. Glad we had this talk.

“You saw the scrimshaw?”

Barbara’s tone was calm, which was why Harrison stopped and looked up at her, two ledges above. “Yeah. Dr. Sayers got the police to give her a copy.”

“Can I see?” There was a thread of something strange and unsettling in her mild question. Harrison thought he could understand that. The Scrimshander did gruesome, beautiful work, and Barbara had carved herself open to try and see the gallery he had made of her bones.

“I guess.” He stopped where he was started flicking through the photo gallery on his phone, and then remembered that he had deleted a number of photos from his phone earlier that week. The post-mortem photos would be on the cloud, but that was of little use to him in the mobile dead spot of Dunnsmouth. “Fuck. Sorry. I don’t have them on here. I can show you on my laptop when we get back.”

“It’s all right,” Barbara said. She smiled, distant and empty. “Don’t worry about it, Harrison.”

Harrison kept silent for the remainder of the descent. His footing became more unsteady as they came closer to where Lub had said the Scrimshander’s cave was, long ago, and it was harder for him to gauge how stable the ground was with his plastic leg. He told himself it was because of that that he was not speaking. He knew that it was because somehow, in amongst all the shit that was Dunnsmouth, Barbara had managed to be the most disturbing thing for him. He had to get it together. Whatever was in the Scrimshander’s cave needed a level head.

Finally, he saw the opening that he thought might the cave. It was how Lub described it: a hole in the cliff face, the floor dipping down before rising up sharply and further into the cliff. He shone the light from his phone into the cave.

“Watch your step.” His mouth twisted into something akin to an ironic smile. After all, it wasn’t like Barbara could lose her step anyway. She drifted ahead of him, and he shivered in her wake. Everything he had learned in the last decade told him that this was a terrible idea, that he should leave now and never return.

He pushed himself onwards instead.

* * *

 

Harrison could hear the cave before he could see it. Barbara had gone on ahead, moving quicker than Harrison had ever seen her move, like she was being drawn in by its pull. The room held an allure to Harrison as well, and a part of him wanted to race forward as well and see the delicate carvings for himself once again. He resisted that part of himself, forcing his steps to be regular and even.

He allowed himself a moment of awe as he stood at the entrance to the cavern that the Scrimshander had claimed. It was not a large area, possibly wide enough for two people to stand with their arms outstretched. An anchor lay discarded on the floor with a chain around it and Harrison gave it a wide berth. Instead what captured his attention were the walls lined with shelves of scrimshaw. Under the eerie light cast from an unidentifiable source, the bone seemed to gleam and Barbara looked washed out and otherworldly.

“What are we looking for?” Barbara asked. There was a terrible longing in her voice, but it wasn’t clear what she was longing for. Harrison decided not to ask.

“I don’t know,” Harrison admitted, tearing his gaze away from the bone gallery. “The carvings the Scrimshander did were of us as we are now, not as we were at the time.”

“How? That was decades ago!”

“Weird time shit. But if he carved us as we are, I thought that there’d be something here that we’re meant to find _now_.”

“Do you know what it might be about?”

Harrison was about to say no, but then thought about it further. “Yeah, maybe. A monster made of fire.” Greta’s monster, he thought of saying but didn’t. That would imply that Greta held the leash and Harrison didn’t think anyone on this planet could do that. At best it was an on-off switch: turn on destruction, turn off destruction.

Barbara said nothing more, drifting towards a shelf and glancing through the scrimshaw there. Harrison took the shelf on the other side of the cave and searched the scrimshaw for something, _anything_. Faces of people he had never met stared back at him, the susurrus of the sundered not quite loud enough for him to make out distinct words. Each piece of bone felt like something was alive inside it, quivering under his gaze.

The next four shelves didn’t reveal anything promising either. Harrison found himself wondering not how the Scrimshander had gotten away with what he did for so long, but where he got the bone from in the first place. There were so many pieces here, and more upwards from what he could tell.

He turned to Barbara, about to tell her that this was futile, and stopped. Something on the shelf at eye height had captured her attention.

“What is it?”

“I found it.” Barbara gestured at a piece of bone tucked away on the side of the shelf, the bone yellowing with age, the length of Harrison’s forearm and as wide as his hand. Carved onto the bone’s surface with delicate lines was an elongated figure that on first glance Harrison thought was wreathed in flame. As he took a second look, he realized that the figure _was_ flame, the terrible angelic figure he had seen when Greta burned the cultists alive. It seemed likely that this was the reason they were here.

He reached out a hand to pick it up, half-expecting it to radiate heat like Greta had. It didn’t. There was no warmth, no whispering, and when he touched it there was no sense of movement inside it. Unlike the others, which felt like something was trapped inside, it felt empty. He flipped it end to end, searching for some kind of mark or sigil to explain the scrimshaw, but there was nothing. In a room full of whispering, half-living artworks, he wondered how Barbara had found it at all.

“Thanks. How did you know…” he started, turning his attention from the scrimshaw to her. He stopped, and froze. He could see through Barbara to the shelf behind her, the pieces of bone and polished driftwood disconcertingly, distressingly, tangible and solid through Barbara’s increasingly ethereal body. He sucked in a breath. He hadn’t seen this before. All the ghosts of Dunnsmouth were opaque enough to trick his eye into thinking that they were alive. Always had been.

No one leaves Dunnsmouth. Except that it looked like Barbara was, and Harrison had no idea where she would go next, if she went anywhere at all.

Barbara didn’t look surprised at all, and that was what tipped him from inaction to action.

“Don’t.” He reached out, snagged the corner of her suit jacket. He could feel the tightly woven fibers of the fabric before his fingers went numb from cold. “ _Stay_.” It was a command, wrought in anger and fear and the legacy in his blood from when he lost his leg as a child, and it only bore a passing resemblance to his voice.

For a moment she did.

Then she pulled away from his grip, the color and solidity bleeding away and turning her pale and pallid once again. “No. I had one thing left to do before I went to … wherever people go when they die. This was it.”

“But —!”

“Leave Dunnsmouth behind, and go slay your dragon.”

It was a terrible goodbye, and because it was what she wanted he couldn’t do a damned thing to stop her. Instead he stood as witness, empty bone shard in his hand, as Barbara smiled at him once, a fleeting smile that lacked the haunted edge he’d learned to look for, and then dissipated into the air. It was a consolation that she had found peace at least.

In a way it was the happiest ending anyone could have if they were trapped in Dunnsmouth. After all, Barbara _left_ , unlike the poor bastards whose souls were trapped in the scrimshaw that lined the shelves around Harrison, reaching upwards into the dark, murmuring to themselves for eternity. Unlike Harrison, who could drive out in his car but who personally suspected that there was no way for him to leave.

Then again, Barbara had managed to escape. Maybe there was hope for him too. He snorted derisively. He should know better than to pin his hopes on things working out his way, but here he was, trying to do that once again.

“No promises,” he told the scrimshaw left on the shelves, before wrapping his chosen piece of bone in his suit jacket to protect it from the climb back up. “I’m out of practice.”


End file.
